Books and shorts.

"We are so close! We are now only two months and $26,750 away from getting the film to a 'rough cut' which we can present to distributors for the final funds." Sounds urgent, but also doable. The project at hand is ¡Neruda! ¡Presente!, directed by Mark Eisner, who's also edited a collection of English translations of the poems, The Essential Neruda, just out from City Lights. What's more:

Famed Chilean author Isabel Allende will narrate the story. She is fully committed to this project and will play an integral role in the movie's development. When Pinochet installed his military dictatorship in 1973, Isabel fled her country carrying only two books. One was Eduardo Galeano's classic political history, Open Veins of Latin America. The other was a book of Neruda's poems.

It was a bookish weekend. AO Scott didn't just go see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he went armed with a review copy of Stanley Cavell's Cities of Words:

[W]hether or not Mr. Kaufman has read Dr. Cavell, his latest movie confirms - and extends - the philosopher's notion that what is at stake in a certain kind of romantic comedy is also at stake in the strain of thought he calls "moral perfectionism."

To paraphrase (and, heaven knows, to simplify), moral perfectionism is the idea not that we can become flawlessly good, but rather that we can, by a combination of self-knowledge, luck and grace, get ourselves right and be true to those we love.

As Scott mentions, Eternal Sunshine brought Cavell to David Edelstein's mind as well.

Colin MacCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 has come up around here an awful lot, but Gilberto Perez's essay in the London Review of Books is a little less than half about the book itself; the rest is an engaging, personal take on the films.

Definitely worth mentioning as well is Nicholas Lehmann's review in the New Yorker of Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Mass Communications: "Starr, who has a practical acquaintance with the subject as co-founder of the liberal monthly The American Prospect... has roamed through a vast scholarly literature to produce a history that stretches from 1600 to 1941."

Nathan Lee's piece in the New York Times on "the fourth - and arguably best - screen incarnation of [Patricia Highsmith's] enigmatic antihero," Tom Ripley, is a sturdy bridge to news that's got more to do with film than books: "Whatever game was being played with a commercial release [of Ripley's Game], the outcome is that everybody lost - the audience above all." But of course, we do have the DVD. Anyway, also in the NYT

• Stuart Klawans on Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic.
• Frank Bruni reports on HBO's collaboration with the BBC to make Rome, a $75 million 12-parter set in the ancient world.
• Alessandra Stanley on the Jesus docs coming up on TV this week.
• In a piece on Stephen Chow, Dave Kehr quotes former director of the Hong Kong Film Festival, Roger Garcia: "I can't name any other actors in Hong Kong who are able to make the films they star in and control them. He's at the top of the heap."

George Carlin talks to Salon's Chuck Taylor about censorship in Ashcroft's America: "From dirty language to political speech doesn't seem so far of a leap once you get people used to the idea that a government body can do this."

Rob Nelson in Mother Jones: "Traveling by train, motor home, and car from New York City to Los Angeles, his trusty digital video camera in tow, Minneapolis-based filmmaker mark Wojahn stopped to ask more than 500 people of both genders, all colors, and every economic station, 'What do you think America needs?'" That's half the review right there, by the way, but it's a good excuse to point to What America Needs.

Aparita Bhandari in the Toronto Star: "[T]he Bollywood blockbuster is gradually losing its monopoly on the movie industry. A new genre is emerging that is more reality-focused and shot on much smaller budgets."

Our foreign language pointers this week, courtesy of Perlentaucher: First, "Fanny Ardant, 55 anni, in questa intervista esclusiva a L'espresso," with Giacomo Leso posing the questions. Then, Mikael Krogerus in NZZ Folio on a very tough film school in Poland.

"A collusion between Carradine and Tarantino has the air of inevitability." Nick Compton meets "The Legend," David Carradine, and has a nice long chat. Also in the Independent, word from Terry Kirby that both Pink and Renée Zellweger are slated to play Janis Joplin in duelling biopics.

Now that Terrence Malick has abandoned Che, Steven Soderbergh has stepped in to take over the project.

"Minear: Wonderfalls Felled."

"'I said to Laurel [Legler] and David [Thomas] all along, their journey has so paralleled that of the MC5,' says [Rob] Tyner's widow Becky. 'Now we're at the breakup of the MC5. The bully tactics, the pressure. It's almost cosmic.'" Susan Whitall reports in the Detroit News on why the film MC5: A True Testimonial has been halted on the eve of its release. Former band member Wayne Kramer explains his highly unpopular move.

The Hollywood Democrats are rallying behind Kerry, report Dan Glaister and Julian Borger. Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• Zoe Williams meets Julia Stiles and is way impressed: "She turned 23 last weekend, but her mien is much older - she's the way 23-year-olds were supposed to act when Ingrid Bergman was 23."
• Brando at 80: The quiz.
• Sally Vincent meets Samira Makhmalbaf.
• Rory Carroll on the "surge of films, books and plays coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the genocide" in Rwanda.
• Andrew Pulver's "Adaptation of the week": Less Than Zero.
• John Patterson on Sarah Michelle Gellar's future.
• Antony Barnett thinks HBO and Oliver Stone's Looking for Fidel will cause a stir.
• Peter Conrad on our current thing with pain, gore, carnage, death, the works.
• Geraldine Bedell meets Aaron Eckhart.
• Philip French remembers Peter Ustinov.

And finally, to wrap on a literary note, Neil Labute has another one of those uplifting, feel-good-about-yourself-and-the-world short stories of his in Nerve.

Posted by dwhudson at April 5, 2004 3:19 PM